Free Republic

"In the first place God made idiots," observed Mark Twain. "This was for practice. Then he made school boards." The San Francisco Board of Education's 4-2 vote last week to abolish the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps program, which has been active in the city's high schools for 90 years, tends to support his view. Why is JROTC being done away with? It isn't for lack of interest. More than 1,600 San Francisco students currently take part in its voluntary activities. "Kids love this program as if it's family," notes the San Francisco Chronicle. It is "a program that students...

IN THE SPECIAL CITY, choice doesn't really mean choice. San Francisco Unified School District trustees proved as much last week when they voted 4-2 to eliminate the popular Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and deprive high-school students of a program that instills leadership and other skills essential to success in a competitive world. First, the vote was wrong because it hurts kids. Imagine a program so popular that hundreds of students have turned out to support it -- even though it demands from its 1,600 participants behaviors not often associated with teenagers. To wit: punctuality, the proud wearing of a...

ABOARD THE USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN — The aircraft carrier leading the U.S. military's tsunami relief effort steamed out of Indonesian waters yesterday after the country declined to let the ship's fighter pilots use its airspace for training missions — part of a broad effort by Indonesia to reassert control over its territory.     The USS Abraham Lincoln's diversion, which was not expected to affect aid flights, came as the White House asked the Indonesian government to explain why it appears to be demanding that the U.S. military and other foreign troops providing disaster relief leave the country by the end...

tbuddha (299 posts) Wed Dec-01-04 11:44 AM Original message Here's a sneaky way to troll GOP blogs w/o them even knowing Post a link to optruth.org on their blogs with a message like "Support Our Troops!" and "Read the Latest from our Soldiers" or "See combat footage here from real soldiers". It's totally honest, and it will get repukes to read all the stories from soldiers about how they don't like Bush.

The earlier thread about the October Surprise "Mutiny" hit piece on this mornings Today show prompted me to do some Googling to try to see if there were any connections of note.  I felt that even the little evidence I found warranted a quick heads up and (forgive me) a separate thread as a call to action.  I have no particular standing to do this, but this concerned me enough to fire off a flare.It looks like the extreme left is orchestrating an October Surprise propaganda campaign against the war in Iraq and President Bush by staging a "mutiny" of...

<p>On a snowbound afternoon 955 kilometres north of where the U.S. Army says he should be, Private First Class Hinzman, Jeremy D., No. XXXXXXXX*, is sitting in the sunroom of the rambling old mansion owned by Toronto's pacifist Quakers. He is describing the chants he learned in basic training.</p>

(Kabul, Afghanistan-AP) -- Six more children have been killed in a US military assault in Afghanistan. A spokesman disclosed Wednesday that the bodies of six children and two adults were found last Saturday in a compound that had come under attack the day before. Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Hilferty says the military thought the compound was being used by a rebel commander to stock weapons. And he says, at the time, there was no indication that any non-combatants were in the compound. Hilferty says US warplanes and troops attacked the compound at night and says the victims appear to have...

A brief plea for reality in coverage of the trial of DC sniper John Muhammad. Today, a jury did the right thing and recommended the death penalty for the man who brought death to so many others. Perhaps if we considered the terror he struck into the civic soul of those living near our nation’s capitol, there might have been an even worse sentence imposed. The problem of Mr. Muhammad’s repeated rampages is over, but the basic unfairness of the news coverage surrounding his killing spree continues. In virtually every report about Mr. Muhammad, the newscaster mentions that he is...

Free Speech Under Siege at Texas A&MBy Shannon DubberlyTexaminer.com | February 12, 2003 Texas A&M University has suspended the prestigious Ross Volunteer Honor Corps association, a select honored division of the Texas A&M Corps, for allegedly harassing anti-war protestors at a candlelight vigil on February 3. The vigil held in the center of campus by 30 professors, community activists, and members of the Aggie Democrats was organized to protest the war against Saddam Hussein. This vigil followed a protest that was held on the campus earlier that day by many of the same activists, which featured signs such as "Bush is...